Making Sense:
When we change the way we look at things, what we look at does change. This has implications both for us as individuals and as organizations.
- Why You're Wrong about TOP GUN - Maverick Was a Phony. Geek Tyrant: Maverick wasn’t actually a tough guy in the the story, he was just a scared kid who was trying to be a tough guy.
- Designing Change. Esko Kilpi: Change starts often with recognition between new people with different views and different approaches, evolving into a creative, complementary sense of consciousness. Designing change is sometimes about new connections, new people taking part. It is about new agendas, asking different kind of questions and pointing to different kinds of issues.
Making do:
We need to get better and understanding complex systems resisting the temptation to use simplistic approaches to solve them.
- The Innovator's Stopwatch. Part 2. Asymco: If this is the case however, why is it that those who have access to these data (i.e. who is buying and when) not to do the right thing? [...] There must be something about the way companies behave *while* they are watching the evolution of the market. They seem to be running at a cycle time far faster than the market’s overall absorption rate. Is this because competition is forcing them to mis-spend their energies?
Could it be that the behavior of firms is also a function of the psychology and reward systems of managers?
- Over 700 Million People Taking Steps to Avoid NSA Surveillance. Schneier on Security: it is absolutely extraordinary that 750 million people are disturbed enough about their online privacy that they will represent to a survey taker that they did something about it. Name another news story that has caused over ten percent of the world's population to change their behavior in the past year? Cory Doctorow is right: we have reached "peak indifference to surveillance."
- What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs. NYTimes: Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score.
Making It:
Business as Code is replacing business as usual, and that means design and build for complex systems.
- Business at Web Speed. O'Reilly: IT is driving speed to market now — it is no longer merely a cost center. The companies that figured this out, notably companies like Netflix or Nordstrom, are thriving. [...] The cruel irony of more and more companies needing to embrace technology in order to stay competitive is that the specific tool or technology doesn’t matter. Ultimately, every software problem is fundamentally a people problem. Just as software architectures have been radically reinvented over the last decade of web-scale innovation, so too must organizational architectures be re-envisioned. Any organization — whether for profit or in the public sector — simply cannot move at the pace of current technological systems without adjusting their social systems.
- The Stacks, The Patterns, & The Money. Why genre will drive the next stage of the content industries. Matt Locke: The next wave of innovation will emerge from understanding the new patterns of attention on the ‘stacks’, and designing business models that support cultural production in these new ecosystems.
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.